On Tuesday 6th November I attended the inaugural OpenID Europe dinner in Berlin hosted by Snorri Giorgetti; our European Representative for the OpenID Foundation.

David Recordon was there (not from Europe;). He's the Vice-chair of the OpenID Foundation and as such is the oracle of OpenID Jodaness. He went through some of the finer points of OpenID 2.0 and spoke about getting the final signatures together from patent holders to allow for the release of the 2.0 specification; something we are eager to see for extension building (more on that later).

We explored ideas for working together within Europe. OpenID is solid, but misunderstood, hence I see our biggest challenges as advocacy and usability. I spoke briefly of the struggle we have had with this and from that David asked me to document this - Now on my to-do list.

I introduced our decentralized social networking and was happy to see that David was also talking about the same thing! We touched on the idea of Six Apart and Barnraiser collaborating on this. I'll email him on Monday to see where that adventure takes us. Personally my goal here is to see OpenID based decentralised social networking with a specification that allows for any OP to build upon our work.

I spoke to Robert and Martin about how we have handled avatars. Today this is a hack on to the OpenID simple registration extension which is bad. Whilst discussing it I realised that avatars are worthy of their own extension, hence I will also embark on writing that and adding it to our software to tidy up avatar usage in a nice way.

David confirmed that the OpenID messaging specification is awaiting usage. That I take as a challenge:) We need to implement XRi support into our classes in early 2008, after which we will create OpenID to OpenID messaging which will of course be released under GPL as a PHP class.

Thanks to all attending for providing a very engaging atmosphere and a big thank you to Snorri for arranging. Pics below from Snorri.